North Korea Publicly Joins the Islamic Jihad While U.S. Armed Forces Morale Trapped in Team Obama's Sinkhole

By WILLIAM MAYER

September 4, 2012 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Three seemingly unrelated recent events are providing compelling evidence that president Obama's non-traditional view of America's rightful place in the world has led to the implementation of policies which in less than four years have greatly damaged U.S. national security.

So comprehensive has been the effect of Team Obama's approach to foreign policy that it may be very difficult to quickly change course, even assuming that he will no longer govern past January of 2013.

The primary reason is that the president has set in motion what is almost a self-fulfilling prophesy that has already become integrated into the political calculus of America's aggressive foreign adversaries.

From his public statements as president to his previous career as Alinsky influenced "community organizer," it's clear that Barack Obama has a deeply ingrained antipathy towards the United States and believes that America's dominant influence in world affairs was obtained in an illegitimate manner - due to the nation's rapacious imperialistic character.

This narrative plays into the essential core mantra emanating from our most vocal adversaries, jihadist Muslims, that Western society has failed and will eventually succumb to a "superior" Shari'a based ideology.

While this has long been asserted by the Islamists [and their allies in this venture, China and Russia - minus of course the emphasis on jihad and the re-establishment of the caliphate] Team Obama's self-flagellation, its eagerness to embrace the view held by this country's post-World War II enemies can only have resulted in a strengthening of their resolve.

Here we look to the president's Cairo speech as the launching pad for deconstructing America.

Obama's harsh criticism of his own country, passionately delivered within the confines of the seat of Islamic jihad, Egypt's Al-Azhar University , provided the most visible proof yet that America's moment in history is over.

In fact the president's foundational attack on the United States in Cairo was far more effective than similar ones mounted by obvious foes because it came within the same ideological framework used by those who seek to destroy America, with the important caveat that it carried far greater weight and clarity given his position as the implied "leader of the free world."

Regardless of who occupies the Oval Office after the November elections, the next presidency will face the stark challenge of dealing with a world which is far more hostile to American interests and less respectful of U.S. military might than was the case during the - much despised in some circles - Bush years.

Let's posit that while the critique of American power offered by Mr. Obama didn't build upon the indictment of the West previously offered by our Islamist adversaries, its mere affirmation by this president, will require a substantial commitment to counter its effect, one which will almost undoubtedly require the use of American military force.

The critique of America as a morally corrupt enterprise whose influence was quickly waning resulted several generations ago in coinage of the term "paper tiger."

This descriptive phrase came into the public lexicon courtesy of Communist China's blustering Chairman Mao Zedong, a dictator known for his ruthless domestic purges which claimed tens of millions of victims over a relatively short time span.

At the time, the mid 1950s, America was the world's preeminent military and industrial power, though certainly the Soviets loomed as an emerging counterpoint, especially upon its launch of the world's first earth orbiting satellite in 1957, Sputnik.

However, rather than accepting the frightening idea of a perpetual technological/military/industrial parity between the U.S. and the USSR, the Soviet triumph was short lived, quickly countered by a forceful rejection of the premise which was delivered by an unprecedented commitment by a Democrat, John Kennedy, to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, which did indeed happen less than a decade later, in 1969.

So, in essence Chairman Mao's boast was merely that, the sound of a man whistling past the graveyard at midnight.

U.S. supremacy in such matters has not been seriously challenged since..that is until now.

As exhibit "A," we note the announcement that North Korea and Iran have entered into a formalized program of technological exchange, code for North Korea assisting Iran in its building nuclear weapons.

We believe that though such assistance from Korea, as well as Pakistan, Russia and China has been ongoing for quite some time, this weekend's joint announcement constitutes a direct political challenge to the U.S.
What Iran and North Korea are saying here is akin to a taunt, that they are doing this in our face and you we are powerless to stop it.

That is always the ultimate effect of perceived weakness which this administration has cultivated. In real world power politics Obama's manner of self-restraint has proven provocative rather than palliative.

From Reuters:

"Iran and North Korea have signed an agreement to cooperate in science and technology, Iranian media reported on Saturday, and Iran's supreme leader declared that the two countries had "common enemies...North Korea has had close ties with Iran. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables from 2010 showed that U.S. officials believe Iran has acquired ballistic missile parts from North Korea [source, Iran, N. Korea Agree to Cooperate on Science and Technology

Exhibit "B." is similarly disquieting.

As background, last month, authorities in our erstwhile ally in the "war on terror," Pakistan, arrested an 11 year old Christian girl, Rimsha Masih - believed to be suffering from a serious mental disorder - on charges of blasphemy, having been accused by a local imam, among others, of burning pages from the Qur'an, a serious violation of the Shari'a. [see, Pakistani Blasphemy Case - Neighbors of the Accused Girl Worry About Violence] She was immediately arrested and has from then on been imprisoned where she is reportedly - and understandably given her tender age, her fragile mental state and the fact that she is like not guilty of the charge in the first place - not faring well.

Such actions are typical in Pakistan [and other Middle Eastern countries] where Christians and other non-believers routinely suffer such abuse. In once recent example a man was beaten to death and burned by a group of angry Muslims over similar imagined or concocted charges.

In Masih's case the police station where she is being incarcerated has on occasion been surrounded by mobs numbering in the hundreds demanding Islamic justice be meted out to this innocent, which under the Shari'a means death.

As in all such matters Team Obama's State Department, led by Hillary Clinton, has essentially been mum.
This is now a clearly established pattern of this administration, Pakistan has over the previous years received billions of dollars in assistance, yet we carefully maintain the chimera that we are powerless to intervene in the most horrendous and hideous cases such as this.

These are not the actions of a secure and confident super power.

Exhibit "C," in an odd way, completes the loop so to speak, showing the overall effect that such policies have had domestically, with an even more disquieting example.

The abstract of this survey is that the U.S. Military is dispirited and that morale is low, driven there by a combination of factors all attributable to policies set forth by the Obama administration.
The first of these is the wide imposition of severe language and training restrictions on how Islamic terrorism is dealt with [now "man caused disasters"] and the second involves the negative impact that this administration's downsizing of the military has produced.

Regarding the simple question of whether active duty officers felt that the U.S. Army is "going in the right direction," only a tiny minority - 26% - responded in the affirmative.

"...one of the two main themes cited by those who say no is that the Army is now adversely impacted by "political correctness" imposed by both outside policymakers and senior Army leaders...Secondly," said the report, "several comments indicated that political correctness or the influence of politics in the Army is a reason the Army is not headed in the right direction. These comments generally cited the negative influence of government policy makers (outside the Army) as being detrimental to the future of the Army, and indicated that senior Army leaders themselves felt the need to bow to 'politically correct solutions' to appease policy makers, or to 'play politics' within their own organizations."

Since the first days of this administration it was obvious that it was going to sanitize the nature of America's enemies, gone are such technically accurate terms as jihad, Islamic terrorism and other descriptors essential in identifying what or who it is that we are fighting.

Infamously the first official military report on the bloody jihad carried out by Maj. Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood where 13 soldiers were gunned down, was cleansed of any reference to jihad or Islam.

It was as if this premeditated act of war which Hasan justified [along with his spiritual advisor the terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki] based upon Islamic scripture, was merely a very bad instance of workplace violence, some disgruntled officer simply "going postal."

From the outside this reeks of insanity, how can you possibly develop a strategy to prevent or if necessary, go to war, with purveyors of "man caused disasters" or simply purveyors of random terrorist attacks?

What can be used to knit events together so that the process may be rendered understandable?

Though such policies are often characterized as matters involving "political correctness," that term is hardly useful, in the same sense that "liberalism," comes nowhere near describing the neo-Marxism which has seized control of the Democrat party. There is nothing liberal about them and there is nothing random about the deeds of Hasan.

The root cause of this phenomenon is an insane obsessive multiculturalism, an issue we have dealt with extensively. When it becomes impermissible to say with assurance that one culture or society is qualitatively superior to another, implying that everything is relative, then it becomes impossible to adequately assemble a threat doctrine, if one is necessary.

A large component of this pervasive multicultural relativism is itself more deeply rooted in what seems to be the West's societal/cultural shame, its lack of faith in its institutions and consequently an inability to morally navigate in a world where real existential threats exist.

Such will be the legacy of this administration. It will have intentionally weakened itself in pursuit of some grander scheme.

The perspective this president has and continues to bring to the WH is that of an outsider. Though nominally from this society Mr. Obama is not of this country. He brings with him a set of prejudices which are alien to the culture and much more in line with the "anti-imperial" whining displayed by most of the member states of the United Nations.